Treasury’s mission is to improve the wellbeing of the Australian people, and the Treasury wellbeing framework identifies the sustainability of the opportunities available to Australians over time as relevant to that objective (Gorecki and Kelly 2012). It is possible that future generations can be made worse off by inheriting fewer resources from the current generation than they need to match our standard of living (Anand and Sen 2000). Such arguments hold only if actions today do not harm future generations however, this cannot be known with certainty. If we begin to consider whether we owe the future something, then, as Abraham Lincoln has said, ‘posterity has done nothing for us’. It has been used to justify arguments that society need only worry about today because the future will take care of itself. ‘Because we can expect future generations to be richer than we are, no matter what we do about resources, asking us to refrain from using resources now so that future generations can have them later is like asking the poor to make gifts to the rich.’Īn assumption that future generations will be always better off has permeated economic thinking since the work of Adam Smith and David Hume. It is these issues, rather than theoretical paradigms, that are of practical importance to decision-makers. Key features of the sustainability problem are uncertainty about the future, thresholds and substitutability between capital stocks. Defined as maintaining or increasing wellbeing between generations, sustainability requires a focus on aggregate stocks of capital. However, confusion surrounds the concept, its measurement and its application in decision-making. The concept of sustainability has become increasingly popular in international and domestic debate on social progress it is also a key dimension of the Treasury wellbeing framework.
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